Page 2164 - war-and-peace

from that world, to her so remote and alien. She could not
understand why he was so particularly animated and happy
when, after getting up at daybreak and spending the whole
morning in the fields or on the threshing floor, he returned
from the sowing or mowing or reaping to have tea with her.
She did not understand why he spoke with such admira-
tion and delight of the farming of the thrifty and well-to-do
peasant Matthew Ermishin, who with his family had carted
corn all night; or of the fact that his (Nicholas’) sheaves were
already stacked before anyone else had his harvest in. She
did not understand why he stepped out from the window
to the veranda and smiled under his mustache and winked
so joyfully, when warm steady rain began to fall on the dry
and thirsty shoots of the young oats, or why when the wind
carried away a threatening cloud during the hay harvest he
would return from the barn, flushed, sunburned, and per-
spiring, with a smell of wormwood and gentian in his hair
and, gleefully rubbing his hands, would say: ‘Well, one more
day and my grain and the peasants’ will all be under cover.’
Still less did she understand why he, kindhearted and al-
ways ready to anticipate her wishes, should become almost
desperate when she brought him a petition from some peas-
ant men or women who had appealed to her to be excused
some work; why he, that kind Nicholas, should obstinately
refuse her, angrily asking her not to interfere in what was
not her business. She felt he had a world apart, which he
loved passionately and which had laws she had not fath-
omed.
Sometimes when, trying to understand him, she spoke

2164 War and Peace